NEW YORK — Sustainability is a hot topic in fashion and one that Heron Preston and other executives took on during a panel discussion at the Depop Live pop-up in SoHo over the weekend.
With the irreversible effects of climate change looming over the world, the fashion sector is under pressure to reduce its environmental footprint and remove the shame of being labeled the second most polluting industry after oil. Although that label has been dismissed as fake news, indisputable figures show it is nonetheless a pressing issue that should not be taken lightly.
Bridget Anderson, deputy commissioner of recycling and sustainability at the New York City Department of Sanitation, shared a 2017 study that said 200,000 tons, or 400 million pounds, of textiles and clothing are discarded every year in New York City alone.
Everybody World cofounder Iris Alonzo took the claim further, using T-shirts as an example. “A T-shirt is half a pound, so in theory that’s 800 million T-shirts.”
Anderson said the city spends $ 100 a ton to throw textiles into a landfill.
The hourlong session, entitled “Can Fashion Save the World,” was hosted by the peer-to-peer shopping app and was intended to raise awareness among the Gen Z audience, whose members account

PARIS — “Streetwear on the runways of Paris has always been that vision that I’ve shared with my friends, the ultimate opportunity to present some new fresh ideas in a city and platform that we have always looked up to,” said Heron Preston, who today at the Palais de Tokyo will present the first runway show of his namesake label, as part of the official calendar of Paris Men’s Fashion Week.
Call him a quick learner. Preston, who was “raised” by the skate culture in San Francisco where he grew up, and who first started making noise in 2012 with his art-project bootleg spins on the Givenchy Rottweiler T-shirt, said that it was only around four years ago, when he started working with Kanye West, that he was introduced to the world of Paris fashion.
A former art director for West, Preston — who’s considered a post-Internet Renaissance man — worked at Nike and was also a part of the Been Trill art and DJ collective with Virgil Abloh, Justin Saunders and Matthew Williams.
“I really put myself in that environment with Virgil, Matthew and Kanye [West]. And going to Paris with those guys, I was always that kid who felt like a bit

Ugg is celebrating its 40th anniversary by looking back and forward with a new campaign featuring Heron Preston and Adwoa Aboah.
The campaign, shot by photographer and visual artist Erik Madigan Heck, goes live on Thursday and has Preston and Aboah wearing its 40:40:40 collection, a limited-edition range of product reissued in its most beloved styles — Classic Boot, Tasman, Ascot, Neumel and Jesse II — in the original colorway, Sand.
Heck brought a fine art sensibility to the campaign by reimagining California landscapes such as Big Sur and the Redwood Forest in saturated sets with bold patterns, such the sea of poppies, California’s state flower. But it’s the personalities wearing the product that make perhaps a stronger statement.
“We wanted to take the opportunity to look back to who we are as a California lifestyle brand that’s been embraced by bold and provocative people, so the images respect our heritage while featuring product on people we have connected with, but who may not seem like the people who’ve expressed the brand over the last 20 years,” said Andrea O’Donnell, Ugg brand president.
The campaign follows one that featured “unexpected” Ugg fans such as Kim Gordon, Kyle MacLachlan and Cherry Glazer versus quintessential California

Heron Preston’s business started with a white lie.
The red-hot streetwear designer admitted that his first independent foray into fashion came when he bootlegged the popular Givenchy Rottweiler T-shirt, reworking it into a deliberate fake by putting the image on a white T-shirt rather than a black one and selling it under the radar through his Instagram post. Since then, Preston has been twisting fashion in a number of unconventional ways that have brought him and his label to the forefront of the popular streetwear movement.
Here, he talks with WWD men’s reporter Aria Hughes about fashion school, pushing boundaries — and where streetwear might be headed next.
WWD: We’re on stage at Parsons where you went to college. How does that make you feel?
Heron Preston: I’m on the same stage where Donna Karan would host these talks with futurists. Now I’m on that stage and it’s kind of trippy. I was a good student because I was excited to have gotten into this school. It was really hard to get into and once I got accepted, I took advantage of all the resources: I was class president, went to all the talks, I really soaked it up.
WWD: You’ve also have written a